John Hodiak – Movie Musings

Marvellously realistic, grunt’s-eye view of war, very well made and still carrying impact

Director: William A Wellman

Cast: Van Johnson (PFC Holley), John Hodiak (Pvt Jarvess), Ricardo Montalbán (Pvt Roderigues), George Murphy (Pvt “Pop” Stazak), Marshall Thompson (Pvt Layton), Jerome Courtland Pvt Abner Spudler), Don Taylor (Cpl Standiferd), Bruce Cowling (Sgt Wolowicz), James Whitmore (Staff Sgt Kinnie), Douglas Fowley (Pvt “Kipp” Kippton), Leon Ames (Chaplain), Herbert Anderson (Pvt Hansan), Denise Darcel (Denise), Richard Jaeckel (Pvt Bettis)

Apparently, the Hays Code would let bad language slide, if it was being used about War Heroes. Not many 40s film start with a credit crawl proudly calling its cast a bunch of bastards (in this case “the Bastards of Boulogne”). That’s our Battleground, the Battle of the Bulge, based on the experiences of screenwriter Robert Pirosh (who won an Oscar). Reflecting Pirosh’s experience, this is the Battle from the Grunt-eye-view, following a platoon of privates and sergeants pushed up from the rear to Bastogne, filling in the time between terrifying shelling and German advances, with grouching about everything from the food, to the lack of leave to the rotten army life.

As such, it’s not a surprise that Battleground proved a huge, multi-Oscar nominated hit (including Best Picture). Many in the audience surely saw their own war experiences reflected back at them: crappy rations, freezing cold fox-holes and the horrifying prospect of sudden death from the sky, that many American GIs knew from the war. Louis B Mayer believed the country was sick of war but producer Dore Schary persisted and was proved absolutely right.

It’s a film soaking in authenticity, that genuinely feels like it’s been filmed in the mist and snow covered chill of Boulogne rather than the sunny uplands of California (it’s cinematography won a deserved Oscar for Paul C Vogel). Director, William A Wellman, a decorated veteran from World War One, not only knew how soldiers thought, he was also grimly familiar with the mix of machismo, grit and terror on the front. Most of the cast were veterans, some only just out of uniform: and Battleground was the first film that put its cast through boot-camp to get them bonding like a company.

It’s a film rooted in the detail of army banter, with the same topics coming up time-and-again, in the distinctive language of the trenches. There is the insular togetherness of men who have seen a great deal of suffering and survived. Where a fellow soldier may get on your nerves but you’ll defend him to the death. The suspicion and dismissive attitude to replacement recruits until they have earned their chops. The delight in small moments of humanity also ring true: the Californian private thrilled at seeing snow for the first time, the protective way Van Johnson’s Private Holly guards and protects the eggs he’s dying to eat, the eager joy (and suppressed disappointment) when mail arrives (or fails to). These little touches make the characters feel real, their bonds feel lived in – and makes their moments of fear and panic all the more real.

And Battleground is perhaps unique in 40s war films for not judging soldiers when they show fear (in fact, when new recruit Layton confesses to being scared out of his wits, grizzled cynic Jarvess supportively congratulates him on joining a club everyone is a member of). When the men re-encounter Bettis, a man who ran at the first shelling, there is no judgement or condemnation towards him. After all, so many of them nearly did it themselves. All of them fear becoming a bleeding heap, sobbing for their mamas (as we see one of them do in a quietly affecting moment). Private Holly, our closest thing to a hero, twice nearly cuts-and-runs but both times circumstances and self-reproach see him disguise this with acts of bravery. Others may suspect the truth, but it’s what a man does that matters not why he does it.

Battleground gives a focus most war film never give. There are no generals, no sense of tactics or scale and precious little of the enemy. The Battle of the Bulge is a slog, sitting in a snow-filled pit trying not to die. Paranoia and fear is constant: news of German’s disguised as GIs lead to several awkward encounters, including a darkly funny scene of patrols demanding each other to name various pieces of American trivia to prove their bona fidas (even a senior officer). When they sit down to read the GI news, the men are mystified not only about who they are fighting (“Who is von Rundstedt?”) but even the name the press give the battle (“What’s the Bulge?”). Half of them have no idea where they are (opinion seems divided on Belgium or Luxembourg), few speak French and there is a sense that what the war is about matters less than surviving it.

Perhaps to combat this, in a potentially sentimental moment that Wellman and Pirosh manage to make feel uplifting, an army chaplin (well played by Leon Ames) assures the men ‘why they fight’ really does matter – and that if, later, people question the point of sending young Americans thousands of miles to die for strangers, then they know not of what they speak. In Battleground this sense of pride and honour, that what they are doing matters, is an essential battery recharge after weeks of freezing struggle: and it still carries real impact now, reflecting on what so many did for a cause larger than themselves.

Battleground’s cast is largely made up of MGM contract players seizing the opportunity to embody the sort of gritty, earthy parts so rarely available to actors serving in second-string roles or uninteresting leads in B-movies. Van Johnson’s Holly masks his fear with rumbunctious enthusiasm and exaggerated moaning. George Murphy gives a career-best turn as a determined veteran, ready to go home. John Hodiak’s Jarvess is a pillar of wisdom, Ricardo Montalbán’s Roderigues a burst of exuberant life. James Whitmore (Oscar-nominated) as Sergeant Kinnie practically defines Hollywood’s view of the grizzled, grouchy sergeant who secretly loves his men.

It all comes together very well and if Battleground feels overlong and even a bit repetitive at times, that’s to be expected considering it’s reflecting the experience of its characters. But there can be few 40s films as clear-eyed, realistic and unjudgmental about the pressures ordinary soldiers felt under extraordinary circumstances. That focused on the grim slog of surviving, over the glamour of conventional heroism in battle. And perhaps that’s why Battleground spoke to so many and feels so different.

The survivors face the weather, the sea and their own suspicions in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead (Constance Porter), William Bendix (Gus Smith), Walter Slezak (Willi), Mary Anderson (Alice MacKenzie), John Hodiak (John Kovac), Henry Hull (Charles J Rittenhouse), Heather Angel (Mrs Higley), Hume Cronyn (“Sparks” Garrett), Canada Lee (Joe Spencer)

Spoilers: If you can spoil a film made 76 years ago… but the ending will be discussed

The middle of the Atlantic at wartime. A ship has been sunk by a German U-boat, which was itself sunk in the exchange. A single lifeboat picks up survivors, a mixture of passengers, crewmen – and a German sailor from the U-Boat. Low on food and water, with only a faint idea of where they are, can they survive long enough to find either land or another ship? That’s even before we can overcome questions of trust – or not.

Taken from a scenario written by John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock was originally attracted to Lifeboat because he fancied the idea of directing a film that was set in only one location. And a tiny one at that! Needless to say, such is the imagination and skill the film has been made with that you will soon forgot that it all takes place effectively in one tiny room. Instead, as the camera skilfully cuts and moves through the boat, finding intriguing angles and never once let the pace slip, you’ll be sucked in this intriguing story of survival and morality.

Lifeboat was attacked at the time precisely because of these difficult questions of morality. Unlike many other war films of the time, it wasn’t just interested in propaganda. Instead the German here – later revealed to be the captain of the U-Boat – is not only the films most charming and engaging character, brilliantly played by Walter Slezak, he’s also the only one that has any real idea about how to survive. Need a sailor? He’s best qualified. A navigator? The only man with a clue. Need to lop a gangrenous leg off? Willie can do it with a pen knife. His resourcefulness needs to be weighed in the balance though with his lies, manipulations and hording of supplies.

But the fact the film presents us with a Falstaffianly rogueish German, rather than a monster – and also makes him the most effective of the survivors – was a problem at the time. Combined with the fact that the representatives of the allies are a mixed and divided back. A chippy socialist sailor. A decent but ineffective radio operator. A jobsworth nurse, possibly carrying someone else’s husband’s child. An ambitious gossip columnist. An industrialist who assumes he should call the shots. And a black steward who even needs to take a moment to think about before they decide to treat him as an equal, or even use his real name. A unified and decisive group of allies, this ain’t.

The events of the film then develop in a host of challenging ways. Sure, our heroes eventually come together – but its in a murderous fury that sees them lynch Willie, beat him to death and throw him overboard. Willie saves their lives – but he also hordes water and then persuades the delirious Gus (whose leg he amputated) to throw himself overboard when Gus spies his secret water stash.

This lynching scene is the heart of the film – indeed most of the action is a slow, tension-filled, build towards it. And, for all that Willie is a seemingly unrepentant Nazi (dropping broad hints about having spent some time in Paris) who we are told ordered the shooting of survivors in the water, its hard not to feel some sympathy for him as Hitchcock cuts to a close up of his horrified eyes as he realises what the passengers are about to do. Just as the passengers, waking to find Gus gone and Willie assuring them it was for the best, take a on a monstrous inhumanity as they murder him.

Hitchcock described them later as a pack of dogs. Of the passengers, alarmingly it’s the two most decent (Hume Cronyn’s gentle radio operator and Mary Anderson’s nurse) who turn the most savage in the onslaught. Only Joe – perhaps remembering other lynchings he may have witnessed? – keeps a horrified distance from the slaughter. In a traditional propaganda film, as many critics wanted at the time, this would be a moment of triumph. The allies coming together to vanquish their common foe.

Instead, it intentionally leads a queezy and unsettling taste in the mouth. Hitchcock seems to be challenging us to ask just how we feel about this. Willie has done terrible, greedy, awful things. He’s got a lot of blood on his hands. But do we feel its right for these guys to murder him – and as brutally as they do here? (Hitchcock shoots the lynching at a distance, the passengers descending on Willie like a mob, his bloodied face emerging at one point before being dragged back in). There is nothing really triumphant about this. And, after the deed, no one seems sure how to process it. Rittenhouse even suggests Willie deserved his fate for his ingratitude after they hauled him from the water.

As safety is finally found near the end, it’s not clear what anyone has learned. The whole ghastly cycle looks like it might be repeated when a young German sailor is hauled onboard after another supply ship is sunk. Some passengers are ready to butcher him immediately – the sailor fortunately is armed. Sanity just about prevails, but already the passengers are beginning to revert, right down to starting to address Joe by the common short-hand name for a black steward, George.

But then at the same time, it’s not as simple as that. After all, these German sailors sunk a ship killing hundreds of people. During the first night on the boat a baby dies in his mother’s arms – the mother then throws herself overboard the next night, despite the passengers attempt to restrain her. Those deaths are discussed again at the end when the passengers obliquely wonder if they did the right thing. The film won’t say for sure, but leave it to you to decide. And it’s that rich sense of unease that helps make this a rather overlooked masterpiece for Hitchcock. A lot more than just a technical triumph, it’s a searching and questioning film.